WikiTrasparenza

WikiTrasparenza is a tool based on Semantic Media Wiki (SMW). It has been built for monitoring the state of Government tranparency in Italy and the quality of the published datasets in the context of the Italian Tranparency Decree (d.lgs 33/2013).

The Wiki is semantically structured, accordining to an ontology based on the structure of the “Transparent Administration” website section that the Italian Sector Bodies should follow.
With this Wiki, by means of pre-made forms, it is possible to carry out a census about the published dataset, keeping track of, e.g., the format, the attributes, the year of publication of the dataset.
SMW was chosen in order to be able to query the monitored datasets and to analyze aggregated results for easily knowing the actual publications’ status.
The collected data are available in RDF and Queryable using SPARQL querying language (the endpoint is avaialble here)

The Italian Transparency Decree ( Decreto Trasparenza, d.lgs. n.33, 14 March 2013) regulates the Public Administration (PA) obligations in advertising , transparency and diffusion of data, furthermore it implements the anti-corruption law (190/2012).
Since the adoption of the Decree, many datasets have been published by public authorities. However it happens frequently that these datasets do not give enough information ( or not clear enough), or they do not appear in the section where they are supposed to be consulted, or they are simply not machine readable.

In this framework there was the need of checking which kind of mistakes have been made in the publication of data (quality measurment), and what could be done in order to improve it.

The general objective is to have an overview on the Open Govenrment Data in Italy in the context of the Transparency Act (d.lgs 33).
Specifically, we have divided the ojectives in “monitoring”, “technical” and “dissemination/reporting”.

The monitoring phase is structured in 3 goals:
1. Monitoring all the 20 Italian Region Capital – achieved;
2. Monitoring all the 106 Italian Province Capital – achieved;
3. Monitoring all the Italian cities with more than 100 thousand inhabitants- achieved.

The technical part is structured as follows:
1. building an ontology – completed;
2. setting up the Semantic wiki and query the results via “in-line” queries – completed;
3. extract RDF from the wiki and query it via SPARQL- completed.

As regards the reporting and dissemination phase these are the following objectives:
1. First report/seminar describing the Wiki and the first achieved Goals – published;
2. Second report/seminar describing all the achieved goals – published;
3. Dissemination phase and collaboration with other tranparency projects – work in prgess.

In March 2015 WikiTrasparenza has broadened its horizon giving birth to the project Public Contracts for analyzing the published by the Italian anti-corruption body about public financing.

The wiki is reachable at https://trasparenza.nexacenter.org .
By now several public sector bodies have been monitored. All of the three Goals explained in “Objectives” have been achived by December 2014, for a total of 119 analyzed Municipalities and 595 datasets.

For achieving the first goal, “Monitoring all the 20 Italian Region Capital” an hackathon was organized on July 23, 2014 during Nexa’s 23rd lunch seminar. A first report explaining the detailed structure of the Wiki and the results’ analysis of Goal 1 is available in PDF for the time being only in Italian. The results were furthermore shown during Nexa’s 24rd lunch seminar.

Thanks to our intern Roberta Bruno, since the beninning of December 2014 also Goal 2 and 3 have been achieved.
By the beginning of December 2014. A SPARQL endpoint has been set up on https://trasparenza.nexacenter.org/sparql in order to easily query the collected data. Some queries have been formulated, they are available here.

The final report, analyzing the gathered data about all the 119 italian municipalities Provence Capital or with more than 100 thounsand inhabitants, has been published on the 30th of January 2015 and it’s available here. The results explained in this latest paper have also been presented during the 27th lunch seminar seminar. For the time being all the published reports are available only in Italian.

Parts of the findings of this study have been also shown in the ODQ2015 (“Open data quality: from theory to practice”) workshop held in Munich on the 30th of March 2015. The presentation is available here.